After many years of using Sound Forge for wav editing, being a Cubase user and familiar with other Steinberg products, I finally took advantage of the recent promotional price and purchased WaveLab 9.5 Pro. I had not used WaveLab since version 5 or so, whenever it first started support of DVD-Audio via montage’s all those years ago. I never upgraded it back then, so I could not upgrade that old license.
ANYWAY, I primarily work with 5.1 .wav and .flac files, and was sorta shocked that I could not open these directly in WaveLab 9.5. This is very disappointing. For the cost of the software and the fact that it supports hundreds of channels, I cannot understand why I can’t just open a 5.1 audio file and edit it.
Actually, WaveLab only supports eight channels, not “hundreds”. You can import a 5.1 file into the montage and write out a new one, but the editing of that multi-channel montage is somewhat complex.
We have been pushing for proper handling of multichannel files here for some time now. No delivery time has been given, but I suspect without any clear justification that WL10 will be the point at which it appears. All Steinberg’s other apps can handle this, and they’ve just bought yet another in the form of SpectraLayers Pro.
I’d forgotten that! PG has also said that 9.5.50 was the last update that the 9.5 line will see. We are already past the usual quarterly update point, so I feel that WL10 will appear at the next significant exhibition. Note that major new versions are generally announced before availability, so be prepared to hang on a bit longer.
Thanks for the replies everyone. I guess I can wait for Version 10. At least I am in the upgrade loop now, so going from 9.5 to 10 should not be a huge investment.
I haven’t used WL since version 5, so I guess I’ll play around with it using stereo files just to re-familiarize myself with the interface.
PS - I did upgrade to SpectralLayers 6 (from 5), so I have that to figure out as well.